(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a terminal and a method for controlling cell searching thereof.
(b) Description of the Related Art
A home cell is a small base station used in homes, offices, campuses, and hot spots, which is also referred to as a femtocell. The home cell uses a frequency that is the same as or different from other cells e.g., a macro cell, targeting a wider region than the home cell.
When the home cell and the macro cell use different frequencies from each other, the number of neighboring cells for which a terminal searches in order to support mobility from the macro cell to the home cell is quite large. This cell searching increases the computational complexity and processing load of the terminal and has a significant effect on the power consumption of the terminal.
Moreover, the home cell is problematic in that the equipment may be powered on, powered off, and put into a fault condition owing to its characteristics, a carrier frequency in use may be changed on the basis of the frequency management policy of the service provider and the cognitive ratio technology, or physical channel numbers (physical cell IDs, PCIs) used for cell search may be changed. Thus, home cell search information to be stored in the terminal needs to be always kept up to date.
Cell searching is typically carried out by autonomous cell searching. However, since searching for all cells included in a neighboring cell list is periodically performed when using the autonomous cell searching, it is not possible to efficiently search cells.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.